..was a baby-killing murderer, and the people who defend him are little better:
From Jay Nordlinger's "Impromptus"
"Speaking of people who connected me to the world: After publication of my piece "Che Chic," I received a letter from Armando Valladares. Valladares is often called "the Cuban Solzhenitsyn," and like Solzhenitsyn, he has been vilified as a fascist, a liar, a warmonger. Valladares's book is Against All Hope, memorializing the Cuban gulag (founded by Che Guevara, before he left the island for South America). My encounter with this book, long ago, was a milestone in what you might call a political development; the same is true for many, many other people as well.
"Anyway, Valladares writes,
Communist icons inevitably are found out. We need to look no further than the deaths of some 5,000 Polish officers, murdered by Communist firing squads in the Katyn Forest. The Kremlin laid the blame for this act on the Nazis, and succeeded in convincing nearly the entire world.
When those of us who knew better voiced the truth, no one listened. We, and the 5,000 murdered, would have to wait until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Kremlin finally admitted blame for the atrocity.
It is the same with Che Guevara. I knew Che Guevara. He was an assassin, unscrupulous to the core. Many died at his hands, and many more died on his orders. His legend is pure fiction, masterfully crafted by his fellow Communists and the nostalgic Left. Add to their numbers every misguided liberal, a gullible multitude resembling the deluded masses who believed the cowardly lies of the Communists about the Katyn massacre [I interject to say that, when I was in college and graduate school, to finger the Soviets for Katyn was to start a furor.]
Che adulators and fans miss the logical conclusion. Had the object of their adoration and his ideology triumphed, their victory would have unleashed the Communist system worldwide, resulting in the bitterest fruits: total loss of personal freedom, execution by firing squad for dissent, concentration camps, an end to religious expression, and to a free press. Stalin's Russia replicated across a global stage.
That is the legacy Che Guevara intended for us — including for those who adulate him.
The cult of defending dictators and their henchmen is a repeating, albeit illogical, phenomenon. Stalin and Hitler, Pinochet, Castro, and Hussein ruthlessly purged millions of their compatriots and enslaved millions more. They heaped misery and horror on their own people, and yet their defenders vie with impunity against the truth. So it is with Che — a tired old talehttp://www.nationalreview.com/impromptus/impromptus200501180838.asp
