Icon or con?
December 28, 2004
CHE GUEVARA
FOR
Combining the roles of revolutionary thinker and man of action, Che provides a singular example of theory become practice. Despite the common observation that his image now simply adorns the T-shirts of wannabe urban radicals, we still have the historical figure - an influential guerilla commander and political theorist who forsook the comforts of high office for the uncertainties of permanent revolution.
Rather than quit after the Cuban campaign, Guevara persisted with his attempt to mount a war against imperialism on three continents. The standard argument presents him as a double victim - in life and in death - yet this reading either shelters in the haven of hindsight or implies support for Che's undoubtedly corrupt ideological enemies.
His modus operandi may not warrant emulation, but removed from the turmoil of combat, flawed thinking and the appropriation of his image, Guevara still embodies Zapata's epigram: "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
Tony Nesbitt
AGAINST
A young friend was recently asked, in a job interview at the ABC, who he most admired and he blurted out, to his own surprise (and subsequent regret): "Che Guevara."
This cult will not die. The lyrical movie The Motorcycle Diaries is but the latest episode in the packaging and exploiting of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, a Stalinist murderer who betrayed the Cuban revolution that made his name.
It was Guevara who set up the firing squads that enforced his faction's rule in Cuba.
He founded the labour camps for dissidents. He provided the model for the Red Brigades in Italy and their imitators.
He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerilla movement that didn't enlist a single peasant. Yet he inspired thousands of middle-class Latin Americans to organise insurgencies of their own. They all failed, and postponed democracy in Latin America for decades.
Guevara was an enemy of freedom who became its symbol. The cult endures thanks to the selective romanticism of the left, especially its extraordinary tolerance for repression in the name of 'the people'.
Paul Sheehan
