Nixon is what we call a politician, and not a very popular one at that.
Part of his job is to meet foreign leaders.
Despite all of Nixon's crappy behavior, he didn't idolize and want to emulate mao like Che did.
Id much sooner have a Nixon avatar than a che one. Che openly sought out genocide and a violent end to capitalism.
Quote (Kamahl16 @ May 11 2014 03:18pm)
For starters you are really going to site the National Review as your source of information on Che Guevera? I read the article and the only references to Che in there are two quotes, a reference to his running of that prison for 5 months which referred to "varying accounts" of his behavior there (among these "various accounts" is the account that he spared as many as he could from being executed; but that was conveniently left out by your right-wing author) and a quote from his speech to the tricontinental, which is probably extracted from his writings on guerrilla warfare (he wrote a book on it, tactics, etc., I haven't read that one yet, though). Let me clear it up for you and the author, however.
He wrote about hate but he did so in a military pamphlet. Hatred has use in war and is not a unique part of the Cuban Revolution or Che Guevera personally, either. You are going to tell me that soldiers during military conflicts don't utilize hatred of their enemy? See the American propaganda campaign against the Germans in World War I and II, the Japanese in World War II, the VC in Vietnam, etc., etc., to see how hatred becomes a useful tactic for military mobilization. This is not the same as the hatred the author claims Che had, that is universal hatred towards people that does not have a purpose. He believed in universal revolution, one that forced the peoples of the world to ascend from capitalism (best case, most of his people lived and live now in abject poverty) to socialism and eventually some sort of Marxist utopia. Now, I do not agree with his philosophy personally but he was not some evil mastermind, he was someone who witnessed the destructive effects of capitalism first hand and sought to search for something better for his people.
This just gets more and more scathing, how can we not deduce him as a racist after learning of random, non-cited, out of context quotes like these that may or may not have been said!?
For starters I got a little laugh out of the irony of this little bit:
Let's combat fascism and totalitarianism by not letting our people wear the kind of clothing they want to wear!
That article simply comes back to Che's running of that one prison, for 5 months, as the means of proving he was a bad, bad, man, despite showing no actual citation of any of it (he merely references the body count and refers to Che's journals). He makes absolutely no mention of the fact that Che's brand of Marxism actually put him and his comrades at odds with the Soviet Union (which it goes on later to blame for the suffering of millions) which is a reason for Che's leaving Cuba and going to fight in the Congo and eventually Bolivia. It makes no mention of the fact that most of the work Che did for the Cuban forces after the Revolution actually involved his education and he was working primarily for the Cuban banks before he left the country, he didn't walk around like some military despot offing people for fun like your right-wing pundits would like everybody believe. It also conveniently leaves out all of the efforts the United States, via the CIA, made to murder not only Che personally (like I said, they tried to car bomb him in one instance and killed his neighbor), but overthrow the entire government (see efforts under Dwight and of course th*** of Pigs, as another).
Your persistent either inability to respond to what I've mentioned here and other posts will probably get me to stop arguing because I'm kind of tired of referring you to this stuff if you aren't willing to disapprove of it or at the very least acknowledge it.
This is basically what the Internet amounts to for simpletons, bringing Hitler up.
I feel I should state the obvious since you don't seem to understand this simple point, Hitler is not a poor role model because of his drive or even because of his personality, he is a bad role model because he sent millions of innocent people to their deaths in arguably the most horrific mass action humanity has ever produced. He believed in a literal ethnic cleansing and actively sought to make that a reality, and what's more frightening is that he managed to mobilize an entire nation and its' vasts resources to make that a partial reality. Let me ask you this; was that done because of communism? Was it done because of capitalism or Marxism? Let me ask another question; does it matter? What use do "isms" have at this point? Those things I mentioned are theories, they are created by individuals who believe that they are the best way of using our resources or organizing societies; they are not ideologies of hatred like Hitler's was. The bottom line is this, and I find this is important -- the great evil, the one common denominator is that the State is the great evil. Hitler's hatred wouldn't have been as dangerous if he didn't have that infrastructure to use and complete his goals.
Let me make one more point, since your articles critique Che primarily as being anti-Democracy (which he was, I will not deny that) -- Hitler was democratically elected! Slavery was upheld for hundreds of years in a "free Democracy". These "isms" are just propaganda.
Your question of whether violent resistant to capitalism is too simplistic. How do you mean? Capitalism can be manifested in terms of military power, or at least it has been (when talking about the U.S. military and its guardianship of U.S. corporations, as an example), in which case it ought to be met with military resistance sometimes. I'm sure your fond of those little snake flags that say "Don't Tread on Me", right? What exactly does that mean? It means you reserve the right to provide for your "common defense" and if that manifests itself violently then unfortunately that's the proper response.
This is idiotic. He wasn't a cartoonish supervillaim like you imply. He wanted to mobilize the revolutionary proliferate to overthrow the bourgeois for the betterment of everybody. Look at the genesis for his ideas, he developed them when he traveled around South America and saw the extreme poverty people lived in, saw the exploitation of miners, saw the exploitation brought on by United Fruit and these passions were nurtured through his reading of Marxist material. None of this translates into wanting a nuclear holocaust. The fact that you consider his goals (his actual goals, not the ones told to you by right-wing blogs) worst than the nuclear bombing of a civilian target is frightening because morons like you can vote (well, maybe it's lucky that doesn't really do anything).
He doesn't want "me" dead. "I" never interacted with him in any way. In all of the writing about him I've ever read, which accounts for more than 1,000 pages (including his personal diaries) he never advocated the random killing of U.S. civilians, nor has he, to my knowledge, ever led to the death of a U.S. citizen. He was hateful of the "Yankees" but he uses the term to refer primarily to the U.S. government, CIA, etc., those who had been actively trying to kill him. I cannot stress that enough, "I" am not my government, not to the CIA, and their actions do not represent or define me, as your question implies.
Of those words you put in that last sentence Marxism does not belong, mainly because they refer to things in actuality whereas Marxism refers to a hypothetical utopia which has not existed on the planet and therefore is not to be consequentially evaluated in the same way that torture can be.
Typical marxist behavior dismissing any criticism and damning evidence as "right wing" or "bourgeoisie" and using various red herrings.
The fact that someone else committed a crime at some point, or that Poland bans his image on merchandise is completely irrelevant to Che's actions and crimes.
Yes he would want you dead. He desperately wanted the country nuked.
"If the nuclear missiles had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!"
Dont you get it? He doesn't care if hes never met you. He advocated murdering on a grand scale to get rid of capitalism.
He was personally responsible for many deaths and would have loved to have been responsible for many more.
The very idea of the Lakers would have sickened him.
We both know he was in charge of executions, and we know he didn't believe in having judicial proof in order to execute someone.
We also know he was filled and motivated by hate and would use any means necessary to promote his goals.
You really think he was trying to save as many people as he could from execution? Thats a sick joke.
You dont like the Hitler comparison, but its very fair.
You admit Hitler is a terrible role model for killing millions, yet fail to see that is what Che wanted too and that its one of the things that makes him a terrible role model.
You can pretend it was for the betterment of everybody all you want, communism is oppressive and fails miserably.
Hitler too thought he was doing a good thing and helping the people.
Embracing tyranny and seeking to violently overthrow any and every capitalist does not make you a good person.
This post was edited by cambovenzi on May 11 2014 02:09pm