Or so I suppose Scott Ehrisman would have us believe. Here's a recent picture he produces on his site, a picture he calls "Che'Bama":
It's not clear whether this is a joke or if Mr. Ehrisman means it seriously. I'll admit that Mr. Ehrisman's sense of humor is often lost on me. There is no context other than the header "Join the Che'Bama Revolucion." I take this to mean that Mr. Ehrisman wants to draw a positive comparison between Obama and Guevara, but one never knows. Is it possible that Mr. Erisman doesn't really know who Che Guevara was, just thinking of him as a cool radical from the past, a kind of Cuban Abbie Hoffman?
Who was Che Guevara? From Jay Nordlinger's December 31, 2004 National Review article "Che Chic" (not available online).
The fog of time and the strength of anti–anti-Communism have obscured the real Che. Who was he? He was an Argentinian revolutionary who served as Castro’s primary thug. He was especially infamous for presiding over summary executions at La Cabaña, the fortress that was his abattoir. He liked to administer the coup de grâce, the bullet to the back of the neck. And he loved to parade people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which so many innocents were killed. Furthermore, he established the labor-camp system in which countless citizens—dissidents, democrats, artists, homosexuals—would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag. A Cuban-American writer, Humberto Fontova, described Guevara as “a combination of Beria and Himmler.” Anthony Daniels once quipped, “The difference between [Guevara] and Pol Pot was that [the former] never studied in Paris.”
You can read more about Guevara here, here and here. Some of these sites are cranky, but they get their facts right. You can also check out the Black Book of Communism, as I would have if I hadn't left it in my office.
What is clear is that Guevara was a beast who enjoyed killing and imprisoning the those whose only crime was to oppose the Communist "revolucion" that some still find so trendy to promote. We have noted other associations of Obama with Guevara here and here. The Guevara phenomenon represents a cult of personality where the glory of Che and his "revolucion" justifies all his crimes against humanity. Killing and imprisoning your political opponents is justified if it is in the name of the socialist paradise. If this is the argument of the Obama supporters, they'd better go back to the drawing board.
To be clear, I doubt Mr. Ehrisman endorses Guevara's crimes. I suspect Mr. Ehrisman is ignorant of them.
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