Humberto Fontova: Che Guevara: 39 Years of Hype
Thirty-nine years ago this week, Ernesto "Che" Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying "What goes around comes around" ever fit, it's here.
The number of men Che's "revolutionary tribunals" condemned to death in the identical manner range from 400 to 1,892. The number of defenseless men (and boys) Che personally murdered with his own pistol runs into the dozens. Imagine Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and Son of Sam T-shirts on such as Johnny Depp and Prince Harry. Granted, these last three didn't match Che's murder tally.
"Executions?" Che Guevara exclaimed while addressing the hallowed halls of the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1964. "Certainly we execute!" he declared, to the claps and cheers of that august body. "And we will continue executing (emphasis HIS) as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the DEATH against the revolution's enemies!"
According to the Black Book of Communism, those firing-squad executions had reached around 10,000 by that time. Sloboban Milosevic, by the way, went on trial for allegedly ordering 8,000 executions. The charge against him by the same U.N. that deliriously applauded Che Guevara's proud proclamation was "genocide."
The "revolution's enemies" bound, gagged and murdered by Che and his henchmen were among the most enterprising and valiant fighters of the 20th century. These Cuban freedom fighters rank alongside the Polish Home Army and the Hungarian Freedom Fighters. They fought just as valiantly, as desperately – and, ultimately, just as hopelessly. They fought to the last bullet and usually to the death.
Most heartbreaking of all, they fought alone and abandoned. They specialized in ripping off their gags and blindfolds to yell "VIVA CRISTO REY!" or "VIVA CUBA LIBRE!" or "ABAJO COMUNISMO!" before the bullets shattered their bodies and the coup de grace from Che's henchman shattered their skulls.
The few survivors live today in places like Miami and New Jersey and qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history. But you'll look for their stories on the History Channel and PBS and in The New York Times, etc., in vain. They fought the Left's premier pinup boys, you see. So their heroism doesn't qualify as politically correct drama.
To be ignored would be bad enough. Instead, whenever they are acknowledged, the mainstream media (MSM) parrot the Castroite slander against them of "terrorists" and "mafiosi." It's a tribute to the MSM and academia's incurable obtuseness and imbecility that they still depict Castro/Che as the "plucky underdogs" against an aggressive colossus – when that colossus was in fact protecting Castro's regime, as pledged to Nikita Khrushchev by JFK in October 1962.
"I don't need proof to execute a man," snapped Che to a judicial underling in 1959. "I only need proof that it's necessary to execute him!"
Not that you'd surmise any of the above from the mainstream media or academia – much less from Hollywood. From the high priests of the fourth estate Che Guevara receives only accolades. Time magazine, for instance, honors Che Guevara among "The 100 Most Important People of the Century."
The man who declared, "A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate" (and who set a spirited example), who boasted that he executed from "revolutionary conviction" rather than from any "archaic bourgeois details" like judicial evidence, and who urged "atomic extermination" as the final solution for those American "hyenas" (and came hearth-thumpingly close with nuclear missiles in October 1962) is hailed by Time not just among the "most important" people of the century – but in the "Heroes and Icons" section, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov and Rosa Parks.
"If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart of America, including New York City," Che Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November 1962. "We will march the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims. ... We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm." This was Che's prescription for America almost half a century before Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Al-Zarqawi appeared on our radar screens....