Charlatan

Wow. That's just a little hyperbolic, no?

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tisonlyi

Well, I'd prefer my revolutions conducted in the mould of Gandhi rather than the some of the transcendent, violent prescriptions of Franz Fanon (a la Che).

Che as genocidal maniac - No. Just no.
Che as maniac - Absolutely not, you need to read something he wrote, rather than what is wrote about him.
Che in comparison to Hitler or Mao - Baseless as well as ridiculous.

Che used violence as PART of what he was part of building and wanting for humanity. Not genocidal, maniacal violence, but the using of arms to further political objectives.

It shouldn't take you too long to think of some of your heroes who did likewise.

Also, as an aside, you might like to ponder on whether the US coup against the Arbenz government in 1954 directly led to the galvanizing and motivating of a young Che into the revolutionary that much of the world embraces as a hero - albeit flawed.

Blowback. I wonder what's coming down the line now?

Directed in the Holy name of Jesus and The Lord.

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--

Baraka_Guru

Thanks for saying this first.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
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jorgelito

Perhaps, but it depends on your perspective really.
-----Added 9/9/2008 at 12 : 56 : 43-----
I agree. In regards to George Bush, I think it would be fair to study whether he was a terrorist and war criminal or a voice for democracy.

But in regards to Che, that was my point. I thought it was ridiculous the way people are tossing his salad around here without regard to his atrocious history. His very image offends me in the same manner that Mao, Hitler et al offend me.
-----Added 9/9/2008 at 01 : 04 : 49-----
I respectfully disagree. Che murdered natives, women and children indiscriminately. I don't buy the "Che used violence as PART of what he was part of building and wanting for humanity. Not genocidal, maniacal violence, but the using of arms to further political objectives." His violence was still wrong and criminal in my opinion. He's no better than Osama et al in that regard. Those guys do the same thing. Che used violence in the "Don't agree with me, then die" manner.

Some of my heroes like MLK Jr, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa are nowhere near similar to Che. Maybe I missed your point there?

In any event, I think clearly Che leaves a lot to be desired.
-----Added 9/9/2008 at 01 : 10 : 04-----
Yes, I agree, me too.

I don't understand this portion of your post.

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host

roachboy, I suspect the reaction you provoked.....yes, provoked....happened because, through no fault of your own..... you inserted your opinions and briedly blocked the "tractor beam", from the intended target of "the Mighty Wurlitzer".

Unless you live in an area like I live in....AND listen to at least an hour each day of conservative, evangelicized Salem Comm. "talk" radio, you probably are not conscious of the CONSTANT reinforcement a significant protion of the country receives each and every day....."liberal Hollywood elite.... extreme left democrat party.... here in the greatest country on god's green earth..... liberals hate america and christian values, we are defending the scanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, Bush will be regarded as one of the greatest presidents....."

Michelle Malkin, as hard as it is for us to believe....has one of the most popular weblogs on the internet.....#3, according to these rankings...... here are three examples of her campaign against "Che", linking him to Obama and Hollywood "elite". Then there is a bigger list of her commentaries which include "Che"...... and, from what we see, it works.... it's about linking "liberals" to "the otther", the demon, "Che" !

They spew this "stuff", as I'd imagine batshit crazy people would, roachboy, and they win elections.... It's almost as if they've convinced themselves "Che" was a more brutal terrorist and villainous thug than....Menachem Begin.

Charlatan

I think the point about Che is that yes, he used violence. But to describe him in the terms you have used seems a bit over the top. Would you describe George Bush and his administration in those terms? Their regime change in Iraq is not all that different when it gets down to it.

__________________
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- Old Man Luedecke

jorgelito

I think that's a fair point. I would disagree that it is necessarily over the top though. It all depends on who you ask. The damage that Che and Fidel wrought on the continent was so severe, I'm sure there are many who do not regard Che as a "hero".

In regards to George Bush: It's too early or too close to tell at this point. I think in 20 years or so, when we look back, we will be able to analyze and come to some sort of conclusion better. My guess is that history will not look favorably upon George Bush or his administration but on the other hand, there will be some sort of romanticisation of his "legacy" as well. I think you may be too kind to GW. In addition to Iraq, there is the Guantanamo debacle, Afghanistan campaign, poor handling of the economy, strained relations with our allies and others, Axis of Evil, etc... Give it some time. We will be able to put things into perspective. Cheney, Rove, maybe even poor Condi will also be included in that judgment. For better or worse.

Only time will tell.

__________________
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to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

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tisonlyi

Blowback - The unintended consequences to friendly forces following an action upon an enemy.

i.e. The US overthrows the democratically elected, leftist Arbenz government of Guatemala in 1954 where Che happens to be at that time. Before the coup, Che is looking to further his medical career, with a side interest in revolution. After the coup, Che is fully committed to a productive, anti-colonial revolutionary career. That US empire more than most.

If the US hadn't gone and done the bidding of United Fruit by reinstating their (neo-)colonialist grip over Guatemala via a coup, would one of the the most famous men who described the what, how, where, when and why of taking on US imperialism - not to mention inspiration - ... would Che have even become a revolutionary?

Debatable.

As for wondering what is coming down the line now... well, where to start.

The US is currently at war in bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where bombing civilians, women and children have been a motif.
Threatening war against Iran.
Heavily posturing against and provoking Russia. (Issues with Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, The Baltic States, the rest of central asia, oil, etc)
Props up economically, supplies militarily and protects Israel diplomatically.
Still has massive numbers of troops deployed in South Korea and Japan, despite massive protests.
Has recently had a coup succeed only to fail within days in Venezuela.
Is meddling in the politics of Bolivia to try and provoke secession by - surprise, surprise - the oil rich elements of the country.
Colombia. Props up economically, protects diplomatically, supplies militarily and praises internationally what is known to be a Failed State. It isn't in the US-sponsored top 10 anymore, but really...

The list goes on.

A coup sparked Che.
Previous Afghani and Saudi adventures sparked Bin Laden.

Iraq is a nightmare, it could easily result in attacks on "The Homeland" down the line. Certain people have been only too happy to recruit Jesus into their war, hence, down the line, potential blowback in the Holy name of Jesus.

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--

jorgelito

Ah ok, got it. Thanks for the clarification.

__________________
"The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but
to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

- My recruiter

Charlatan

jorgelito: I would agree that "romanticizing" and "commodifying" Che is a bit odd (and in the latter case, highly ironic). But I would say that about most historical figures.

When I was asking if a comparison can be made to George Bush and his Admin, I was really just asking about the ends and the means part of the equation rather than the pop culture legacy.

That said, I can certainly see why a certain left leaning crowd might view Che with misty eyes. He presents a very heroic figure... an intellectual and a doctor who not only talked but took action. Yes, he was a guerrilla warrior who killed people (it's difficult to call him a terrorist as he largely fought against soldiers). But you can also argue that he was an idealist and a nation builder -- someone who viewed the colonial, imperial and corporatist dictatorships of Latin America and Africa as something that could only be overthrown through armed struggle.

It's the funny thing about most historical figures, they are never black and white. Some of them did some pretty awful things.

For me, Che stands as someone who stands firm against the worst aspects of US imperialism. It's also important to remember that he was a man of his time. I would like to think that if he were alive today he would be working with the democratically elected governments of Latin America that are currently struggling to rid themselves of decades of negative US influence (see: Boliva, Argentian, Venezuela, etc.).

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- Old Man Luedecke

ottopilot

Yes... the iron fist of the evil U.S. Empire. U. S. Imperialism... another fashionable cliché. Wears well with Ché t-shirts, blogging, and driving a Prius. Rage against the machine! ... dude.

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tisonlyi

Care to set out, maybe in another thread, how you fit US aims, actions and modern history into a world view that doesn't include "US Imperialism"?

It's easy to mock, shake your head, etc, but I really can't see how anyone can look at history and the current state of affairs and judge the US as anything but an imperialist power, selfishly, ruthlessly abusing it's dominant or hegemonic power crush other views on how life can be lived, or who should be telling them what to do.

Please, show me the error of my ways.

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--

roachboy

thanks host--i didn't know about the new revisionist use values being appended to che by the right-machine. this now makes some sense as another corridor in the funhouse of political/politicized signifiers which are always available to live through should reality get to be a burden.

jorgelito---i have no particularly nostalgic ideas about che guevara--but you don't need to be attached to find the ongoing conservative revision of the past to be disturbing.

watch chris marker's "le fond de l'air est rouge"

Fond de l'air est rouge, Le (1977)

for a crash introduction to the history that you've obviously been lied to about.
without an assumption that we're talking about the same thing, no discussion is possible.

=======================

gee otto---> there can't be an american empire or any problems attending neoliberalism if you don't look, if you dismiss any criticism as "fashionable"
there's nothing but "america-bashing" if you don't look, if you do no research, if you watch tv.

there's more going on with you that this---what's the point of going one-dimensional, particularly when you know that you're in a position you can't defend?

__________________
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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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Charlatan

I know it sounds cliché but if you read your Latin American history, it's there. Off the top of my head...

Guatamala 1954 - the US supports and funds the overthrow the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz on the orders of the United Fruit Company

Brazil 1964 - the US supports and funds the overthrow the democratically elected government of President Joao Goulart

Chilean Coup of 1973 - the US supports and funds the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende government.

Argentinian Coup of 1976 - the US supports and funds the overthrow of the democratically elected Peron government (LINK)

Venezuela 2002 attempted coup - the supports and funds the attempted coup of the democratically elected Hugo Chavez government.

You will note that each of these governments is left leaning (to various degrees). Most were pretty much aiming for the type of "socialism" that is practised in Scandinavia. This was deemed counter to US interests.

The above list is a sample from a much larger list... and if you just poke below the surface you find the US supporting and training the people behind these coups in everything from Economics and Torture to Massive Loans and Counter-Insurgency.

I am sorry that it has become a cliche but the mainstream American view of history is funny that way.

__________________
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- Old Man Luedecke

Poppinjay

Watch out, America's hat, or Canada's basement will overthrow whoever wins in October.

Among the latin doings, count Cuba pre-Fidel among them. Cuba was rife with American criminal activity, aided by the American government. We freaking planned an execution gone wrong in order to return Cuba to the hands of mobsters.

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dlish

i coulda have sworn that you were talking about ayman al zawahiri

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host

otto, if it's not about objecting to the motives related to class stratified power and wealth, and the cluelessness that would motivate people to vote for the grandson and great-grandson of George Herbert Walker and Samuel P. Bush, what is it about, supporting it, apologizing for it, altering history, sweeping it under the rug?

dc_dux

One only need to examine the history of the School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) to understand a little about US colonialism in Latin America...particularly to prop up right leaning regimes...and how it created an environment for "revolutionaries" to thrive:

I expect someone to say...consider the source...SOA Watch has agenda..blah blah blah...

But some of the nastiest goverment officials in Latin America are graduates of the School of the Americas.

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roachboy

the contemporary neo-cons are the direct descendents of the fine people who brought you the school of the americas, who brought you right-wing paramilitary death squads (by training them) who preferred to support fascist and fascisant regimes in latin america to anything remotely progressive, even social-democracy--anything that would have redistributed wealth and land, anything that would have disrupted the colonial power structure that the americans have worked to maintain in the interest of "anti-communism" since world war 2, in the interest of the colonial project set into motion by the "monroe doctrine"---the contemporary neo-con movement is the pure excresence of the national security state, the representatives of the direction along which the united states turned itself into everything it claimed to oppose, setting itself up as an enemy of democracy and ally of oppression and exploitation. the school of the americas is just one of those places that allows you to walk through the mirror, shift from living inside the consumer-bubble that is "the amurican way of life" and start to think about what that way of life has cost others, the extent to which the "amurican way of life" is predicated on exporting of the worst features of american capitalism--from the plantation system (pace united fruit) through to the "free trade zones" particular to globalization. the neo-cons are the pure excresence of this trajectory within the history of the united states. threatened by the unravelling of the cold war that enabled them to flourish, by the undermining of the rationale for the vast expenditures on military equipment, the vast expenditures on "security systems," by the undermining of the rationale for the entire national-security state, this class fraction developed an alliance with the populist-reactionary politics of the american extreme right beginning in the middle 1970s and working steadily since. the outline of this history is well-known, obvious in a way to anyone who looks.



same people, same ideology, different rhetoric.

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

dc_dux

otto....recent US history is littered with foreign policy failures that propped up right wing governments- Batista in Cuba, the Shah in Iran - currently Uribe in Colombia.

Or other non-democratic regimes that the current administration buddies up to- most notably. the house of Saud. Combine that with attempts to characterize current foreign policies in religious terms as "righteous" or a "task from God" and you create a breeding ground for anti-Americanism.

__________________
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
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roachboy

i don't think that the term "anti-americanism" means anything. it collapses the ideology and interests of a particular faction within the united states into the whole. i think that's wrong: it's no surprise that this "anti-american" thing is a conservative meme.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

I agree.

The problem with this term maybe becomes clearer if you consider the opposite. If one is not "anti-American," then one must be "pro-American." Or maybe there are varying degrees of "Americanness," such as "unAmerican" and "inAmerican," and "homomerican" and "heteromerican"...the latter set in reference to the view of "America" as the melting-pot juggernaut of a former British colony run by rich, old, White males or, alternately, the many Americas that happen to include the various identities otherwise: Black lesbian poets and Chicano linguistic theorists included.

What does any of that mean, really?

I think for the sake of argument, "anti-American" actually means "critical of America's influence on [the topic of which we are speaking at this given time]." This too is a bit of a wash because it implies the term has a multitude of meanings.

There are also those who make the charge of "anti-Americanism" as though the culprit hates America: the culture and the people. The worst conclusion being that those who are "anti-American" would perhaps, if given the right conditions, would prefer to commit genocide.

So, yes, "anti-American" means nothing. We should do away with the term. Those who use it do so at the risk of being seen as either intellectually dishonest or lazy. Don't say "anti-American"; say what you really mean, because the rest of us aren't quite sure what that is.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

dc_dux

yeah...you are both right.

I would reframe it more as many of our foreign policy decisions in propping up right wing governments over the last half century have had the consequence of creating or contributing to insurgencies that come back to bite us on the ass.

And, according to a recent BBC poll I posted elswhere, citizens in many nations - Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Turkey, the UAE, Britain - believe that Obama would have a foreign policy that would likely improve relations between the US and the rest of the world.

__________________
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire

jorgelito

It's tough to speculate and your hypothesis is reasonably sound if not a bit overly optimistic in my opinion. I still think he would take arms and commit acts of terror. I suppose why I am so repulsed by him is because as an intellectual, doctor, it is unforgivable to me that he would murder natives, women and children indiscriminately. If not for that, then yes, he was a rather remarkable figure who committed stupid mistake number 2: he idiotically ceded power to Fidel Castro.
-----Added 9/9/2008 at 06 : 44 : 49-----
That's good to know Roach, and agreed. Thanks for the link, I will look into it at the next opportunity.
-----Added 9/9/2008 at 06 : 46 : 18-----
Yes I believe this was the "better a dictator than a communist" doctrine from the Cold War era.

__________________
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to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

- My recruiter

dc_dux

yes..but the School of the Americas or the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation is still training thugs who pose as right wing government officials today.

__________________
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire

Charlatan

Yes, it was that but it was also a huge push to open the Latin American markets to American business interests. The left leaning governments were interested in protectionist policies that would not give access to (or would with high tariffs) US business interests.

Without exception, the Juntas imposed Chicago School lassez-faire styled economic systems upon their nations.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

jorgelito

I didn't know that actually. For some reason I thought it just went away post-cold war. Ah, too many regions to study.
-----Added 9/9/2008 at 09 : 02 : 12-----
I remember the Chiquita thing.

I think the economic systems they imposed were thuggery and gangsterish. Not true free market.

__________________
"The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but
to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

- My recruiter

Charlatan

Some would suggest that a "true free market" cannot exist without "thuggery". If there is a democratic rule the populace would never stand for it.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Cynosure

Reading your comments makes my eyes glaze over.

jorgelito

Interesting point.
-----Added 9/9/2008 at 11 : 52 : 55-----
You have to get used to it actually. It's just the writing style. But, whether or not you agree with his posts, they are still worth the reading. Even if you have to read it a few times to get it.

__________________
"The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but
to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

- My recruiter