Excellent piece in The Globe and Mail about our favorite t-shirt salesman and murderer titled “Lies the revolutionary told me.”
Indeed, without his ideology, Che would have been nothing more than another serial killer. Ideological sloganeering allowed him to kill in larger numbers than any serial killer could imagine, and all in the name of justice. Five centuries ago, Che probably would have been one of those priest/soldiers exterminating Latin America’s natives in the name of God. In the name of history, Che, too, saw murder as a necessary tool of a noble cause.
But suppose we judge this Marxist hero by his own criteria: Did he actually transform the world? The answer is yes – but for the worse. The Communist Cuba he helped to forge is an unmitigated failure, much more impoverished and much less free than it was before its “liberation.” Despite the social reforms the left likes to trumpet about Cuba, its literacy rate was higher before Fidel came to power, and racism against the black population was less pervasive. Indeed, Cuba’s leaders today are far more likely to be white than they were in Fulgencio Batista’s day.
(H/T Richard Schulze)