Spoiled Students Admire Violent Revolutionary

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3442

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1346

Ashley Herzog

On the eve of the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5135, the aristocrats inhabiting the palace of Versailles enjoyed “sporting the clothing of the working classes as an ironic lark,” according to writer Charles Stenson. These pampered elites were undisturbed by the fact that their peasant getups were a bold insult to the real peasants, many of whom were dying as a result of the elites’ self-serving policies.

The clueless aristocrats have descendents in spoiled college kids who think it’s trendy to idolize Communist revolutionary Ernesto “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4470’s face is emblazoned on T-shirts; he was glamorized by the movie The Motorcycle Diaries; and Time magazine described him as “a potent symbol of rebellion.” But few of the college hipsters who admire Che know what he actually stood for.According to Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova, during the first few years of Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba, Che was “second in command [and chief executioner for a regime that jailed and tortured more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin’s and executed more people as a percentage of population in its first three years in power than Hitler’s.”

Che wrote that “the solution to the world’s problems lie behind the Iron Curtain”— and he was willing to torture and kill anyone who disagreed.

Che’s stock trade, according to Fontova, “was the mass murder of defenseless men and boys.” In a typical incident (one you won’t see in The Motorcycle Diaries, which portrays Che as a sexually potent idealist who just wants to save the poor), he ordered the execution of a 17-year-old boy suspected of political subversion. When the boy’s mother, Rosa Hernandez, tearfully begged the Communists to release him, Che invited her into his office.

“Come on in, Señora,” Hernandez recalls him saying. Then he picked up his phone and, as she listened, demanded that the Communists “execute the Hernandez boy tonight.”

A former prisoner named Pierre San Martin described his experience to a Miami newspaper. “One morning Che’s guards shoved a new prisoner into our cell. His face was bruised and smeared with blood. He was a boy, couldn’t have been much older than 12.”

The boy had fought back against Communists who arrested his father. Later, San Martin watched Che personally execute him: “Che raised his pistol, put the barrel to the back of the boy’s neck, and blasted. The shot almost decapitated the young boy.”

http://www.thepost.ohiou.edu/Articles/Opinion/Columns/2008/10/08/25763/

2008-10-09