Guest Post by Anaximenes: "Che Che Shame"

Our world's irony is outright hilarious. You just have to step back and take a thirty-thousand-foot view of it to marvel at how preposterous our collective behavior can be. If logic were to be applied toward many kinds of human endeavors, one would presume people might stop and say, "Wait a minute. What the hell were you thinking?" and stop doing what they're doing. But of course, as we all know and as I have said over and over, most people are really fucking stupid.

So, Anaximenes will just have to keep pointing out the obvious.

Let's take the remarkable capitalistic enterprise of elevating a brutal, Marxist war monger, Che Guevara, to an icon that has become its own industry, filling the shelves of retail outlets and merchandised practically everywhere. Does anyone besides me see the irony of a communist insurrectionist contributing to the net operating income and investor returns to such mainstream clothing outlets like Burlington Coat Factory? At least Target had the good sense to pull all Che Guevara logo merchandise from its stores before Christmas last year, but only after considerable protests from Cuban exiles living in this country who fled for their lives from Che's communist government. Of course, you'll remember Target also distinguished themselves before the 2005 Christmas retailing season by banning the Salvation Army from their establishments.

You've seen the Che Guevara logo, of course. It is as instantly identifiable as the McDonald's Golden Arches and Kellogg's Tony the Tiger. It was derived from a now-famous photograph taken by Alberto Korda in 1960 that, once plastered on t-shirts, backpacks and headwear, has been omnipresent at anti-American rallies around the globe ever since. Closer to home, it is now being sported by iPod-wearing teenagers and dissident college students of aging hippie parents who somehow think this is a cool, trendy icon representing a message of rebellion from the establishment. Little do these cretins know that if they ran into Che himself, he would fucking kill them as wealthy, class-oppressing, elitist Bourgeois of a capitalist, imperialist government. Che Guevara was a dedicated Marxist. He believed in communism and that the ends justified the means, including anarchy, murder and terror.

To think that his likeness has since become the object of a western money-making enterprise is nothing short of hilarious. College kids from upscale neighborhoods wear his likeness believing it is somehow cool and chic, or that revolution is a neat idea, and are too fucking stupid to realize that the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an installment in the moral heartlessness of our time.

Che was not only a Marxist and a communist, he was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but left a wake of death and destruction. He presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. He spoke about martyrdom and managed to write about his personal totalitarian philosophy: "Hatred is an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become...."

Thankfully, he was killed in Bolivia in 1967 at age 39, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.

The present-day cult of Che Guevara - the t-shirts, posters, iPod carrying cases, belt buckles, lighters and watches - has succeeded in obscuring the appalling reality of this mass murderer.

Now, to be fair, the industry that makes this crap for stupid American teenagers and dissident college students, marketing all the Che Guevara junk under the tag line "For all your revolutionary needs," isn't any more interested in spreading a message of revolution and anti-capitalism than it is in correcting its own atrocious behavior of canonizing a brutal murderer for profit to begin with. After all, they're just trying to make a buck, playing on the insensitivity and stupidity of the rebellious American youth market.

But I wonder why they stopped at Che Guevara? After all, before we all started seeing him on t-shirts and backpacks, Che was really a fairly obscure and diminutive figure in a long line of brutal military fascist and communist leaders the world has come to know and hate. Why stop with Che Guevara t-shirts and iPod carrying cases?

How about some of these neat ideas to further capture market share among the stupid, insensitive American youth, while capitalizing on icon likenesses to which no royalties would ever be owed?

Pol Pot's Pots and Pans - "For all your human extermination and mass grave digging needs." Most people don't know that Pol Pot's real name was Saloth Sar and are only vaguely aware that he is generally regarded as the fourth most notorious mass murderer in modern history, responsible for the deaths of two million people. Even better, Saloth Sar basically got away with it, having never been brought to justice or made to pay for his crimes. He died of a heart attack while under house arrest at the age of 73. Almost no one knows what he looks like because photographs of him are few and have not been widely circulated, so the manufacturer of Pol Pot's Pot and Pans would have great latitude in putting almost any menacing-looking Indo-Asian male on its label and get away with it, just like Pol Pot got away with murdering all those people! That would be just one more irony for all of us to enjoy. Personally, I'd like the Pol Pot cast iron skillet, embossed with Saloth's personal motto, "I did not join the resistance movement to kill people. My conscience is clear.”

Adolf Hitler's Handmade Hearthware - "For all your final solution human crematorium needs." Displaying the swastika is considered bad form in the United States and it is downright illegal in Germany. But I think a stainless steel fire poker with the red, white and black swastika at its crest, and the likeness of the Third Reich's infamous dictator painted on the handle would be a fine edition to any set of fireplace accoutrements. The little shovel sold as part of a set of fireplace tools would probably be my favorite piece. As I clean out my fireplace, I could pretend to be shoveling out the ashes of millions of gassed and incinerated men, women and children, and would be especially proud of the stamped Auschwitz camp motto on the scoop of the shovel: "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Brings Freedom). For many Europeans in the early 1940's, those were the last words they read as they were marched to the showers. Although Hitler ordered the mass extermination of what amounted roundly to six-million Jews, World War II claimed 50-60 million lives. Hitler products should do well if mass merchandised at Wal-Mart.

Mao Tse-Tsung's Macaroni Products - "For all your starving peasant needs." Instead of having to look at that stupid picture of Chef Boy-R-Dee on boxes and cans of crappy pasta products, think of a brightly colored red box with yellow lettering declaring, "Civilize the mind but make savage the body." Staring back at you from that shiny red box would be none other than the portrait we know so well of the Chairman himself, complete with balding head and chin wart. That would really stimulate the appetite, eh? Somewhere around 40-million people died during Mao Tse-Tsung's dictatorious reign, largely of starvation, while he lived a life of veritable luxury until the ripe old age of 83. Mao Tse-Tsung's Macaroni Products have no nutritional value, pretty much like the dinner tables of starving Chinese peasants from 1949 to 1976. The more of Mao's Macaroni Products you eat, the hungrier and weaker you become until you are no longer a burden of the state.

Joseph Stalin Snow Shovels - "For all your freezing gulag needs." Red snow shovels, embossed with the hammer and sickle, and the likeness of Uncle Joe's famous mustachioed mug, will sell like hot cakes during the coming nuclear winter. Certainly more than he gave the 40-million people within the borders of the Soviet Union that died as a result of his purges, forced famines, state terrorism, labor camps, and forced migrations, Joseph Stalin Snow Shovels will make a fine edition to your growing list of insurrectionist tools, t-shirts, and cookware.
The metamorphosis of Che Guevara from a jungle revolutionary into a capitalist brand is both funny and sad. It is funny that it comes years after the political and ideological collapse of all that Guevara represented. But it is sad because it seems customary for followers of a cult not to know the real life story of their hero and the historical truth of his accomplishments.

But perhaps there are glimmers of intelligence and truth. Certainly not from the United States, but from young Argentines who have come up with an expression that rhymes perfectly in Spanish: “Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué.”

It means: “I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why.”

(The Rants of Anaximenes)