A reader writes:
You
a swastika. You know: ironically."
I have a rather interesting view to this kind of stuff living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the working-class Polish community that is still strong is nevertheless seeing an influx of the affluent twenty-something set spilling over from nearby Williamsburg. I happen to like the change, as I can get gourmet coffee right after a nice hearty meal of kielbasa and pierogies. Still, it's hard not to wonder how clueless a skinny Sarah Lawrence grad with the scraggly beard must be to walk with a "CCCP" t-shirt through a neighborhood with streets and squares named after Lech Walesa and Jerzy Popieluszko. In my more sinister moments, I hope for an encounter between said Sarah Lawrence with a burly Polish guy who lost family to the Gulag to see what happens.
The above photo is from the eminently enjoyable "Look At This Fucking Hipster," which captions, "Hitler is totally going to hate this." Another reader:
I dunno if Che was really advocating genocide. Alluding that he did kind of joins in the idiocy of all those ill-informed youngsters wearing his shirt as a way to seem "rebellious", don't you think?
You're just promoting the distortion of someone who did try to live by the principles he truly believed in. I dont even think he was a fan of the Soviets. His principles were wrong in my opinion, and I'm certainly no worshiper of Che. But of all of the "revolutionaries" in history, he was a guy who did try to put a positive and a decent foot forward in achieving what he believed would be good for his people. He lost that battle of course, but the man was not some bullshit behind the scenes power-hungry asshole, like say Castro was/is.
The t-shirts with his name are horrific because they totally dismiss the fact that he saw the USA as a corporate capitalist devil that was obsessed with the oppression of its own people. The idiots that parade around with his face on their chests don't understand that. But let's not join them by jumping in the pot of distorting the guy's legacy even further by saying he was for Stalinistic genocide.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa provides a lesson for our reader:
Myth can tell you as much about an era as truth. And so it is that thanks to Che’s own testimonials to his thoughts and his deeds, and thanks also to his premature departure, we may know exactly how deluded so many of our contemporaries are about so much.
Guevara might have been enamored of his own death, but he was much more enamored of other people’s deaths. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his “Message to the Tricontinental”: “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.” … It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people—proven enemies, suspected enemies, and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain…. His belongings were now mine.” Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim “was really guilty enough to deserve death,” he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: “He had to pay the price.” At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.
Luis Guardia and Pedro Corzo, two researchers in Florida who are working on a documentary about Guevara, have obtained the testimony of Jaime Costa Vázquez, a former commander in the revolutionary army known as “El Catalán,” who maintains that many of the executions attributed to Ramiro Valdés, a future interior minister of Cuba, were Guevara’s direct responsibility, because Valdés was under his orders in the mountains. “If in doubt, kill him” were Che’s instructions.
The Dish 